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The Characters in the Story
Harry Furniss
1910
14.4 x 8.2 cm vignetted
Frontispiece for A Child's History of England in Oliver Twist and A Child's History of England, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing III, frontispiece, after 418.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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A Child's History of England, Dickens's somewhat moralistic serial version of a national history from the Roman invasion of Claudius in A. D. 43 to the Glorious Revolution (1688), appeared in Household Words without illustration from 25 January 1851 sporadically through 10 December 1853, and it subsequently appeared in a triple-decker with just F. W. Topham’s single title-page vignette for each volume. Dickens's new illustrator for the 1860s, Marcus Stone, provided eight character studies for the Illustrated Library Edition of 1862.
Although he had the advantage of seeing the extensive illustrations in volume eighteen of the The Household Edition, 1878 (illustrator, J. McL. Ralston), Harry Furniss elected to provide just a frontispiece featuring a youthful goddess Britannia and an elaborate title-page for the second half of volume 3 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910). However, in the numerous thumbnails he has provided impressionistic sketches of a dozen figures in the former and forty such figures in the latter.
Whereas the mounted knights in these miniature vignettes might be taken as vague representations of monarchs as different from one another as Henry V and Richard I, certain figures are unmistakable — the woman knighting a kneeling youth (centre, right) is likely Queen Elizabeth, knighting Sir Francis Drake on the deck of The Golden Hind. The order does not seem to be entirely chronological, proceeding from the upper left (Alfred the Great as a monarch writing) through Richard the First (as a triumphant crusader on foot, upper right) through Charles the Second on horseback (lower right), Charles the First, and Cromwell (lower left), Henry the Eighth and Cardinal Wolsey (upper left), and Elizabeth addressing the troops at Tilbury Fields shortly before the arrival of the Armada (left-hand margin), with her successor, James the First of the House of Stuart, immediately below her. However, the identities of some of these forty-odd figures cannot easily be determined since Furniss has provided no full-size illustrations against which to compare these thumbnail vignettes, although he has often done so for the other ornamental title-pages for the Charles Dickens Library Edition.
Avery, Gillian, ed. Charles Dickens: "A Holiday Romance" and Other Writings for Children with All the Original Illustrations. Everyman edition. London: J. M. Dent, 1995.
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.
Dickens, Charles. A Child's History of England. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862.
__________. A Child's History of England in Works. Centenary Edition. 36 vols. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910-12.
__________. Oliver Twist and A Child's History of England. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 3.
Created 9 January 2014
Last modified 23 January 2020